Ballaké Sissoko, Vincent Segal – Chamber Music

One bare room in Salif Keita's Moffou studio and three recording-sessions without overdubs that were woven inside the protective cocoon of the Mali night. Sheltered from the agitation of mankind inside the heart of the world, Ballaké Sissoko and Vincent Segal chased out of their minds everything that can distance a musician from his art - all the vain considerations of genre and style that only have interest for collectors of labels - the better to concentrate on the essence: harmonious imbrications of language and signatures, and the interlacing of their inner song, to which the subtle waves of improvisation and the secret vibrations of silence contributed additional density. Their complicity is such that the kora and the cello, far from resulting in an overly formal exchange of rejoinders, seem to express themselves here with a single voice: Sissoko et Segal mix their blood and their sounds to conclude a pact that aims to cause a (precisely) unified word to spring forth with incomparable clarity. What the listener hears in Chamber Music is both rare and precious: two sensibilities in unison, on the same wavelength, creating music which, literally, follows naturally.